Chapter 4

What He Finds Under the Bed

Virelle's POV

The lights were too bright when I opened my eyes. It took a second to remember where I was and then the smell of the room told me before anything else did, I was in the hospital. I remembered the floor rushing up, the warmth spreading under me, Kael's voice breaking apart as he begged me to stay.

"Mrs. Hartwell." A woman in a white coat stood beside the bed, tablet against her chest. "You're awake. Good."

"The baby." My hands went to my stomach before I had words for the fear. "Is my baby…"

"Your baby is fine." Her voice was gentle in the way doctors get after they've said this line a thousand times. "You had a scare, some bleeding, likely from stress and low blood pressure. We'll want to keep an eye on you over the next few weeks, but the heartbeat's strong. You're both going to be all right."

I started crying before I even realized I was doing it. Months of holding myself together came apart at once, in a hospital bed, in front of strangers.

The doctor waited, then asked gently, "Is there someone we should call? Your husband?"

I wiped my face. "He's busy. Work. He has a meeting tonight."

It wasn't even really a lie. Kael was always busy. There was always somewhere else he needed to be.

The truth was simpler and it hurt more. I didn't want him here. I didn't want to watch him perform concern he didn't feel over a wife who apparently wouldn't be missed if she vanished.

A nurse came in later to check my blood pressure and asked, in the easy way strangers ask questions when they don't know what they're really asking, whether this was my first. I told her it was. She said congratulations like she meant it, and it was such a small, ordinary thing that it nearly undid me all over again.

After she left, I lay there with my hand on my stomach, thinking about how this baby didn't know anything about forgotten anniversaries or hotel lobbies or careless jokes told to laughing businessmen. This baby only knew my voice, my heartbeat. It was the first thing in my whole marriage that belonged to me completely, without conditions.

Lying there, staring at the ceiling tiles, I made a decision. I wasn't going to raise a child in a house built on silence and forgotten anniversaries. I wasn't going to teach a son or daughter that love meant sitting by candlelight waiting for someone who never showed up.

Wait, I fell at home, but who took me to the hospital?

Kael's POV

The house was dark when I got home. I flipped the switch in the hallway like something might be wrong with the wiring, but the lights came on fine. It was just empty. No smell of dinner. No sound of Virelle humming some song in the kitchen I'd never bothered to learn the name of.

"Virelle?"

My voice came back at me down the hall.

Her side of the closet stood half empty. The suitcase was gone, along with the mess of dresses and shoes I'd complained about more times than I could count. I would have given a lot to see that mess again right then.

I sat on the edge of the bed, the same spot where I'd held her head a few hours earlier, watched the color drain out of her while blood spread across the carpet. Someone had already cleaned it. There was nothing left to prove any of it had happened, except the hollow feeling sitting in my chest.

I called her three times. Straight to voicemail. I called the hospital, except I didn't know which one, and by the time I found the right one, they wouldn't tell me anything, I wasn't listed as an emergency contact. She'd changed it. I didn't even know when.

I sat in that house until midnight, staring at a phone that wasn't going to ring, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, the quiet bothered me. I kept replaying Frank's stupid comment, my own answer, the sound of Selene laughing right after. It hadn't felt like anything in the moment. Now I couldn't get it out of my head, the way a splinter you don't notice until hours later suddenly announces itself with every movement of your hand.

I thought about the dinner she must have set before I texted her I'd be late. I wondered how many nights like this one there had already been that I never noticed, because I was too busy telling myself the meetings mattered more.

I noticed things now that I hadn't bothered to notice in months, the specific way she left her reading glasses folded on the nightstand, the second toothbrush in the bathroom that was hers and not mine, a grocery list in her handwriting still stuck to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a lemon. None of it had meant anything to me yesterday. Tonight I couldn't stop looking at it.

I picked up the grocery list and read it twice, like it might tell me something about where she'd gone. It didn't. It just told me she'd been planning to make the rosemary potatoes again, the ones from my mother's recipe, and that she'd remembered to buy candles.

I'd lived alone before Virelle. I'd built a company out of long nights and empty rooms and never minded it. Somewhere in the last four years the quiet had stopped being comfortable, and I hadn't noticed until she was gone and the sound of nothing turned into something I couldn't sit with.

Virelle's POV

Three days later I sat across from a lawyer in a cramped downtown office, the kind with worn leather chairs and diplomas gone slightly yellow behind the glass.

Mr. Renshaw was older, kind-eyed, careful with his words, the sort of man who'd clearly watched a hundred women sit in that same chair with the same look on their face. 

His office smelled like old paper and coffee gone lukewarm, and somewhere down the hall a phone rang twice and stopped. A ceiling fan turned lazily overhead, barely moving the air.

"Take your time," he said, when I didn't speak right away. "There's no clock running in here."

I set the folder on his desk anyway, because taking my time felt like something I couldn't afford. He opened it, scanned the first page, and looked up over his glasses. "Divorce papers. Are you certain about this, Mrs. Hartwell?"

"Is anyone ever certain?"

"No," he said, not unkindly. "But some people are certain enough."

I thought about the little shoes still in my purse, about a man who could laugh that easily while telling a room full of strangers I wouldn't be missed. I thought about the note I hadn't written yet, the one I would leave tucked under the tests, because some part of me still needed him to know, even if I couldn't stand to watch his face while he found out.

"I'm certain," I said.

He nodded once and pulled a pen from his desk, sliding a second folder toward me, the paperwork for what came next, the practical parts of ending a marriage that no one warns you take just as long as falling into one. My voice was barely above a whisper when I added the rest.

"I want to disappear from his life completely."